G_CONST_RETURN

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

(replies to gtk-devel-list please)

Greetings,

I just opened bug #644611 about deprecating G_CONST_RETURN.

After discussing this with Matthias on IRC, it is our intention to phase 
out use of this macro in our platform.  The usual way that we would do 
that is by removing our own use of it and marking it as deprecated (and 
guard its definition with the usual G_DISABLE_DEPRECATED check).

Unfortunately, the macro appears very widely in the headers of many of 
our platform libraries.  If an application using G_DISABLE_DEPRECATED 
#includes one such header, their build is broken.  That would impact... 
well, just about everyone.

For this reason, we've decided to 'take it slowly'.  The current plan is 
to remove uses of the macro from glib and gtk+ and add a notice about 
the pending deprecation to the documentation.  The next few months will 
serve as a 'grace period' for other libraries to clean up their headers. 
 After that, we will introduce the deprecation in the usual way and 
deal with the (hopefully reduced) fallout.

Cheers